Ignacio Abel submitted this video of a prototype home cooling system based on Raspberry Pi. I’ll leave it to him to explain the system:

Night cooling is a very efficient way to save energy by cooling a house with the colder air at night. Most people don’t use it because it requires them to manually turn on a whole house fan and open windows. Automation mechanisms are available but very expensive. My project aims to solve the issue by building an inexpensive automation device using a Raspberry Pi and a relay board. It has a couple of inside thermometers and an outdoor wireless thermometer. When the outdoor temperature is a few degrees cooler than the inside temperature, the relays activate an actuator to open a window and turn on a whole house fan (both modeled with Lego). It also has an LCD display to show temperatures and to set a few options.

Ignacio posted information about his system, including the list of parts, the code, and a general overview of how it all works together. Here’s hoping we’ll see this project implemented in a future post on MAKE!

Matt Richardson is a San Francisco-based creative technologist and Contributing Editor at MAKE. He’s the co-author of Getting Started with Raspberry Pi and the author of Getting Started with BeagleBone.